Cinema: Peckinpah: Primitive Horror

Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's first film without a hero. It is indeed
his first film to challenge the very ideal of heroism around which his
work so far has been built. In Ride the High Country (1961), his main
characters were two aging lawmen who could not, even when they tried,
abandon their own code of honor. By the time of The Wild Bunch (1969),
the main characters had turned into a ragged troop of bandits, but the
code persisted. It was their adherence to a suicidal notion of dignity
that made these outlaws heroes...